Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. (1 John 2:18-19, ESV)

Pete, along with his wife, Geri, are co-founders of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, a groundbreaking ministry that integrates emotional health and contemplative spirituality to pastors, leaders and local churches. (On file at AM, emphasis mine)

“Now I don’t agree with everything in everybody’s denomination, including my own. I don’t agree with everything that Catholics do or Pentecostals do, but what binds us together is so much stronger than what divides us,” he said. “I really do feel that these people are brothers and sisters in God’s family. I am looking to build bridges with the Orthodox Church, looking to build bridges with the Catholic Church,….” (Online source, emphasis mine)

As ridiculous as the issue of non-protesting “Protestants” in the SBC is, we can really see the attack on the biblical doctrine of the Reformation—and the infiltration of the Church of Rome with mainstream evangelicalism—to the extreme with the egregiously ecumenical Emerging Church aka Emergent Church, which is a cult of postliberalism—now morphing into Emergence Christianity (EC), within mainstream evangelicalism.

We need only to look as far as the following from the Emerging Church Group TransFORM, which is a social network created by “Kingdom Journalist” Steve Knight of Emergent Village (EV). If you don’t know, EV is also a very key group within the EC, and Andrew Jones aka Tall Skinny Kiwi has been with the EC from the very beginning:

Radically “rooting” orthodoxy in Jesus, orthopathy in contemplation, orthopraxy in social justice & orthocommunio in authentic community (Online source)

And there we also find as members such Emerging/ent/ence Church royalty as leading EC guru Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, “theologian in residence” at the EC church of his equally heretical quasi-universalist pastor Doug Pagitt, and Phyllis Tickle, the Empress of Emergence. In fact, just today, at his blog McLaren writes:

Someone Who Seeks Salvation Other Than The Way God Has Decreed Remains Lost

In closing this for now, permit me to show you what is a stake. Well respected evangelical Christian apologist Dr. Ron Rhodes brings out a key point concerning this reversal of the Reformation in his book Reasoning from the Scriptures when he says:

According to the current ecumenical spirit of the times, it might not be “politically correct” to say that many [Roman] Catholics are lost and are in need of evangelization. I am aware of the controversial “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” [ECT] document, signed by both evangelicals and Catholics. This document declares evangelical-Catholic unity, and its signers promise to refrain from evangelizing one another’s flocks, labeling this activity “sheep stealing”…

In this [ECT] document we read; “Evangelicals and Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ”… Certainly I concede that Catholics and evangelicals can work together for the betterment of society, actively cuntering secularism, moral relativism, societal decay, and the like. But I also believe there must be a line drawn when it comes to biblical doctrine. (17, 18)

Dr. David Wells brings out the other very important point in his book The Courage to Be Protestant when he reminds us:

At the time of the Reformation, this case [of the distinction between the church visible and the church invisible] was made against the Roman Catholics, who insisted that the only way one could belong to Christ was by belonging to the [Roman] Catholic Church, submitting to its teaching, and receiving the grace available through its sacraments. To be in the church was to be in Christ…

The Reformers countered that we come to be in Christ by faith. We are joined to Christ by faith alone, faith in his finished work on the cross whereby he took our sin, bore God’s judgment in our place, and now clothes [regenerated believers] in his righteousness. From first to last, God’s acceptance of us is by his grace, and so, too, is our capacity to believe in what Christ has done for us. (219, emphasis his)

And here’s the bottom line: The Roman Catholic Church did not, and indeed she cannot, change her teachings on the Gospel and justification. In his article History of the Doctrine of Justification Dr. John Gerstner begins by reminding us that justification is:

“The doctrine by which the church stands or falls.” So said Martin Luther about justification by faith alone. John Calvin agreed, calling justification by faith the “hinge” of the Reformation.

Dr. Gerstner then correctly informs us:

It was not until the Council of Trent (1545-1563) that justification was officially confirmed as a process based on human merit derived through divine grace. This was the article in Session VI, Canon 7 of the Council of Trent which led the Roman Catholic Church away from the orthodox teaching on justification. (Online source)

I happen to be a former Roman Catholic that, through absolutely no effort of my own, God mercifully delivered from the religious bondage of the Church of Rome into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, by His grace alone, through faith alone, in the finished work on the Cross of Christ alone. And further, since the majority of my pateral family—on both sides—still remain enslaved to the Church of Rome, this kind of lunacy in the Lord’s Name where someone like Rick Warren is taking it upon himself to reverse the Reformation hits extremely close to home for me.

So, as one Jesus called as a pastor-teacher, I now come forward to tell you in the Lord that Dr. R.C. Sproul is dead-on-target here:

The Roman Catholic Church has a long history of using studied ambiguity in order to win over opponents. Let me be unambiguous: Without a clear understanding of sola fide and the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, you do not have the gospel or gospel unity (1 Cor. 1:17; 2 Cor. 5:21).

The ECT initiative repeatedly avowed that the signatories had a unity of faith in the gospel. This included Roman Catholic signers who affirm the canons and decrees of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, which anathematizes sola fide. (Online source, bold mine)